A Kindergarten Teacher Stands Up to Bill Gates
An Open Letter to Bill Gates,
By Ruth Rodriguez-FayAmerican education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?
- Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.
Dear Mr. Gates,
Your Foundation contributions always seem to make for interesting prime time news. The real story about what is actually happening on the ground where your market-driven policies are now the “norm” is relegated to other venues such as academic research, progressive blogs and media outlets.
While it is honorable for anyone with your wealth to do whatever possible to give back to the community, the community that helped you make your wealth, your history of failed experiments with so-called market-driven, data-based education is well documented.
The test and punish, high stakes testing mandates and the calls for teacher accountability as a means towards improving education have clearly failed an entire generation. Despite this failed policy,